Feel the Love

I made a mistake this holiday weekend.

I decided to read The Death of Ivan Ilych after all these years.

But first I read Family Happiness.

I finished them and read some parts over again.

Then we sat down to Thanksgiving dinner.

It was small this year. It was modest, and fine. We didn't try to be anything we aren't. The bird was good, the stuffing and side dishes too, and the pies were better.

We got up really early this morning, drove to IKEA, and ordered the rest of our kitchen cabinets.

Then we walked around looking at all that stuff.

You know, they're so good at what they do, IKEA.

At marrying our longings with our actual needs. Our fantasies with the practical requirements of living.

It isn't a lie that they sell. Oh, no. It's worse.

It's a wish to help us live better.

But we can't, you know. It's a miracle we live as well as we do, and frankly, our brutality and veniality is no surprise to me at all as I witness us--each of us, all of us--saying things on the day after Thanksgiving at the top of our entitled lungs such as this:

"WELL! You've just lost yourself a SALE, my friend! This is outrageous! I've waited in this line I don't know how long--forty minutes! Forty minutes I have waited here for one small thing!"

or,

"Hal, pull the cart up, unless you want to rip my coat. HAL! DO YOU WANT TO RIP MY COAT???!!"

I kept think of the things that Tolstoy had to say. I kept wondering if he was right.

And more to the point, if he had been able to live up to his own example.

I began to wonder whether any of us, for more than an isolated moment here or a string of moments there, can live by this rule of life: only compassion for others makes life worth living:

"The main feature, or rather the main note which resounds through every page of Tolstoi, even the seemingly unimportant ones, is love, compassion for Man in general (and not only for the humiliated and the offended), pity of some sort for his weakness, his insignificance, for the shortness of his life, the vanity of his desires... Yes, Tolstoi is for me the dearest, the deepest, the greatest of all artists. But this concerns the Tolstoi of yesterday, who has nothing in common with the exasperating moralist and theorizer of today." (the composer Peter Tchaikovsky in Vladimir Volkoff's biography Tchaikovsky: A Self-portrait, 1975)
[via books and writers: tolstoi]

With a little shout out to rarity, and a wish for a happier post tomorrow)

(image via alana mcgillis]

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